We can argue the aspect all day long. Frankly if someone chooses not to shoot their low SN 1903 I will respect that. They should also respect it if I choose to do so without any ranting and raving about how I am wrong and they are right.

I also pedal a bike to work all summer and winter when I can.

From those statistics I am far more likely to suffer a bike catastrophe than a low SN 1903. Should I quit? I used to motorcycle, also a huge risk (I mitigated it as best I could and continued to ride)

Walking out the door in the morning and getting in your car is a risk.

So, rather than he said, she said, with some data to put the risk in perspective, you can make your decision accordingly

As we have found out, there is some risk to just shooting as any gun can fail, certainly a risk in reloads (but there have been a lot of blown up guns due to faulty factory ammo as well).

So to pull one small risk factor out of the "shooting risk" and get obsess with it is a false if human reaction.

The real question should be is it a low sub set of risks in all risk factors.

Recently we had a heli ski operation kill (3 people I think). The statement was, we checked the snow and the it was not moving much! Ok, note to self, any movement means an avalanche, get the &*^% out of there. That is simply stupid risk on top of a pretty risky situation already.

I put the risk of shooting a low SN 1903 in the so low a factor as not to be relevant. Franky it looks like the weak brass had more to do with the blow ups than the receivers.

Mitigate it by actually assessing the gun as you should any gun (head space) use good ammo, safe reloading practices. Then shoot it if it passes the sanity checks (or not if you are not comfortable with it).

And as for blown up, no, but read this one as to REAL RISK FACTORS involving welded receiver recovered rifles!